Hybridity refers in its most basic sense to mixture. The term originates from biology and was subsequently employed in linguistics and in racial theory in the nineteenth century. Its contemporary uses are scattered across numerous academic disciplines and is salient in popular culture. This article explains the history of hybridity and its major theoretical discussion amongst the discourses of race, post-colonialism, Identity (social science), anti-racism & multiculturalism, and globalization. This article illustrates the development of hybridity rhetoric from biological to cultural discussions.

Hybridity as racial mixing

Hybridity originates from the Latin hybrida, a term used to classify the offspring of a tame sow and a wild boar. A hybrid is something that is mixed, and hybridity is simply mixture. As an explicative term, hybridity became a useful tool in forming a fearful discourse of racial mixing that arose toward the end of the 18th Century. Scientific models of anatomy and craniometry were used to argue that Africans and Asians were racially inferior to Europeans. The fear of miscegenation that followed responds to the concern that the offspring of racial interbreeding would result in the dilution of the European race. Hybrids were seen as an aberration, worse than the inferior races, a weak and diseased mutation. Hybridity as a concern for racial purity responds clearly to the zeitgeist of colonialism where, despite the backdrop of the humanitarian age of enlightenment, social hierarchy was beyond contention as was the position of Europeans at its summit...

Chris L. TerryâsBlack Card is a fascinating meditation on race, with a head-nodding soundtrack that moves from funkLPs to punkCDs, Guns Nâ Roses to Outkast. The novel follows an unnamed protagonist, a college drop-out who works as a barista in Richmond, Virginia, and plays bass in a punk band. His bandmates are white, along with the majority of the punks he encounters at house parties and shows, but heâs mixed-race, with a white mother and Black father.

All his life heâs been unsure of his Black identity due to his light skin tone and red hair, attributes that read to white people as âracially ambiguous.â His father tells him not to doubt his Blackness, yet this confirmation comes off more as a warning not to get too comfortable around white people, and, like most kids when receiving advice from a parent, he doesnât really take it to heart…

There is a remarkable essay, âTwo Directions for the Novel,â which is a kind of Beer Summit for contemporary fiction: on one side of the table is Joseph OâNeill, author of the Gatsbyesque9/11 novel Netherland, on the other side is Tom McCarthy, writer of manifestos (still, after a century, a prerequisite for avant-garde credentials) and author of the astringently difficult novel Remainder…

âIâve got a piece coming out for Buzzfeed about the word mulatto. I think thatâs a good word to start using more often. People donât like the word, but they canât point to why, or they think itâs a reference to a mule. But the word is actually an Arabic word referencing people of mixed heritage. It predates the word for mule. Historically, itâs the word we used for people of mixed race in this country. And the thing about words like mixed and biracial is that theyâre completely vague. They donât make much sense. Most black and white people who consider themselves biracial, their race is listed legally and socially as black. Plus bi- doesnât work because there are other races mixed in there, too. Part of the thing that worries me about the biracial movement is that it can be ahistoric. And as I said the vast majority of African-Americans are of mixed racial descent. So by the definitions theyâre using, every African-American is pretty much biracial. It would be a miracle if they did a test and there werenât some European poking in. In my view, mulatto acknowledges that thereâs a larger history. And for me, the black and white mixed experience is part of my African-American experience. I still consider myself African-American, just mixed African-American. Itâs like, if you have a Dad whose Irish, youâd be Irish, and nobody would debate that just because your Mom was Italian. But for African-Americans, we have these rigid ways of looking at the issue. Weâve inherited these preconceived notions.â âMat Johnson

This week marks the release of Loving Day, the new novel from Mat Johnson, author of Pym, Drop, Hunting in Harlem, Incognegro, and others. Johnson and I spoke last week on Skype. I caught him in his car, heading home from a school tour, and we continued our chat as he walked across the campus of the University of Houston, where heâs a faculty member in the creative writing program. Johnson has an energetic, incisive way of speaking. He works historical analysis, social observation, literary critique and wicked one-liners into the span of a sentence or two, always with the kind of conversational ease that makes you feel like heâs been mulling things over for a while and you were just the person he was hoping to see. We talked about race and culture in Philadelphia, prioritizing entertainment in literature, fatherhood, the book community on Twitter, and âthe idea of being a straight male interacting with the feminineâ (yes â sex â but other stuff, tooâŠ).

Dwyer Murphy: Over the course of your career, youâve shifted between novels, graphic novels, comics, and non-fiction. With Loving Day, youâre back to the novel. How do you decide which medium to work with? Does the story dictate the format?

Mat Johnson: Usually it starts with the idea. I would say Iâm a novelist first, but if the idea doesnât fit into a novel, then I look for other ways to tell it. The graphic novel is kind of my way of doing a short story. I donât usually write short stories, but Iâve found that pieces that are about the length of a story and have a strong visual aspect tend to work really well as graphic novels, so thatâs how Iâll tell those particular stories…

In his 1991 hit song, Black or White, Michael Jackson meditates on racial equality, singing, âIâm not going to spend/My life being a color.â However, Jacksonâs well-documented, complicated relationship with his African American appearance speaks to the contrary. In a way, Jacksonâs transformation from his natural skin tone to an eerie, bleached white speaks not just of his profound personal battle with identity, but a broader problem in America as a whole. The simple fact is, that as a result of systematic white supremacy, many African Americans do spend their lives âbeing a color.â This troubling issue forms the central motif of Kentucky-born writer and academic Tom Williamsâ short story collection, Among the Wild Mulattos & Other Tales.

The burdens of oppression, violence, and inequality shouldered by black Americans weigh heavy. But how are bi or multiracial people affectedâthe shades of grey, if you will, in the simplified divisions of âblackâ and âwhiteââand how are they recognized and represented in cultural phenomena like literature? Here, Williams attempts to address these matters in their multifarious forms…

…Author of The Mimicâs Own Voice and Donât Start Me Talkinâ, and currently Chair of English at Kentuckyâs Morehead State University, Williams explores in detail the experience of biracial Americans in a contemporary environment that claims, albeit falsely, to be âpost-racial.â The eponymous âmulattoâ is a term traditionally denoting a person with one black and one white parent, or sometimes referring to someone with mixed black and white ancestry. Not commonly used today, mulatto is regarded as at best archaic and at worst a racial slur, which is reasonable considering the etymology of the word is based in the Latin mĆ«lus, or mule, the infertile offspring of a horse and donkey.

Perhaps unsurprising given his own mixed race heritage, Williams is explicitly concerned with representations of biracial identity, using fiction to consider the ways in which biracial individuals navigate a world that is unsure whether to treat them as black or white. The majority of these stories are located in the Southern and Midwestern states, where racism remains rife, and racial tension is high. One character, in âWho Among Us Knows the Route to Heaven?,â describes his reception as a biracial child in 1970s Ohio as â(o)dder than two-headed calves, stranger than Uri Geller,â and when watching TV at that time, that â(n)ever once did I see a face or family that looked like mine.â It is this alienation that Williams is most curious about, and the steps some biracial people feel forced to take to in order to counteract it…